The American artist Muffin Bernsteins research focuses on harmony. Her style is extremely refined and aesthetically pleasing: it is based on mandalas, ancient ritualistic diagrams that contain different geometric figures within them. The artist, who graduated at Loyola University, New Orleans in 2000 and specialised in a masters degree in 2002 at Florida State University. In 2009 she turned to 17th century Tibet to find, through mandalas, profound religious and spiritual meaning. This is a singular and beautiful choice, especially if it originates from contemporary metropolitan, deeply provincial or tornado-ridden America. In particular, the Katrina hurricane, that devastated Muffin Bernsteins New Orleans in 2005, where she did all she could to help, and decided from that moment on to make nature the sole subject of her art. Cruel nature, which destroys without mercy, yet also nature which palpitates and comforts, vibrates beauty and radiates serenity. The artists biography  amongst other things, she suffered an apartment fire that destroyed all her artworks and belongings  helps us to understand the seriousness and coherence of her artistic motivation: this is not transient, as it is for so many others, but strong, especially in moral terms, on the human level. Flowers, plants, green is always the predominant colour in the mandalas printed on canvas, Bernstein feels she is part of a whole: of the environment, made up of vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms, as of the human community, to which she belongs as a participant. In a world of unbridled individualism, it is nice to find an artist concertedly seeking harmony in her creations and for her artistic talent to involve a civic and social undertaking.

If what the author Joseph Conrad said is true, that Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line, Muffin Bernstein can justly claim this status for her work.written by Michela Turra